The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar
mules of the more eastern tracks are here replaced by
donkeys, who do the journey in a day. Laleh 'Chak, the
name of the pass, is not marked on the map, though its
height is given.
We were three hours climbing up from Rashtegan, and
were disappointed at the top, for there was no forward view,
but only the one behind us to which we had become accus-
tomed over the plain. But after walking twenty minutes
along the grassy level of the ridge, with its points rising in
low outcrops of rock from the rounded knolls, the Shah Rud
valley suddenly opens below. Its saw-edge of pinnacles
runs in a long eastward line to Alamut and the high massif
of Takht-i-Suleiman beyond, like lines of a fortress rising
to the keep. There was no snow, for we were looking
at the southern face, but a bitter wind blew down this great
funnel of the hills. Opposite, rising to a gentle blue peak
on the other side, lay the straight'valley of Javanak, open
like a map. The slopes below us were squared in corn-
fields; their green village patches and ravines of unseen rivers
were already melting into the dimness of evening. The
most noticeable thing in the landscape was its silence:
immense and grey, without a voice of any kind, it lay under
the falling night.
I told Ismail to make for a small wooden shanty far below
which we had been told of as an inn, and to order pilau
while I stayed to take some bearings. This took longer
than I expected, and when at last I started down in the dusk
I felt singularly lonely at the top of so wide a solitude.
Soon I came to the first cornfields, high up and still un-
harvested. Ismail and his mules had long been invisible,
and my feeling of solitude was made rather more acute
than before by the sight of three men with reaping-hooks
leaping down the hillside to intercept me. A reaping-hook